It’s pretty mixed. In Bender's Game, though not technically Bender and Amy but their Cornwood -counterparts, Titanius Anglesmith and Gynecaladriel were kissing and spend nights together. If we take a ski jumper as an example, their competition time at the Olympics started at 10 pm. In the first installment of our Sports & Sleep series, we spoke with Amy Bender, MS, PhD., the clinical program director of athlete services at the Centre for Sleep & Human Performance.I got really lucky and started off in the sleep field as a sleep technologist at a research lab at Washington State University. Players leave the facility and they are on their own. We found in our research that about 80% of Canadian National Team athletes only nap 1-2 times per week with one-third of athletes not napping at all. Intuitively, we knew that wasn’t right. I played multiple sports growing up but settled on basketball. Despite this, teams and athletes are becoming aware of how important sleep is and an increasing number of teams are hiring sleep specialists to optimize recovery and to help with travel management.Shifting circadian rhythms to align with competition times is something I think could make a huge impact on performance. But there are also some athletes who know what they should be doing but poor habits get in the way. An example of this would be to put electronic devices away an hour before bedtime.

However, those athletes who have early morning training sessions may have to take longer naps every day to make up for some of the lost sleep at night. Hours of operation are 9:00 am - 5:00 pm CST, Monday - FridaySports & Sleep: An Interview with Amy M. Bender, MS, PhD

All Rights Reserved Reviewed by the BioHackers Lab Team | Last updated: May 27, 2020 Centre For Sleep's Athlete Services Program Director, Dr. Amy Bender, will be presenting "Sleep, the Ultimate Performance Enhancer" at Tri It Multisport  on Satuday, May 12 between 2pm and 3pm. Now I am working full time as the Clinical Program Director of Athlete Services.

In the first installment of our Sports & Sleep series, we spoke with Amy Bender, MS, PhD., the clinical program director of athlete services at the Centre for Sleep & Human Performance.

It still needs to be answered definitively, but what we find is athletes who are in endurance sports, such as cross-country skiing or long-distance running would need more sleep versus a more cognitively demanding sport such as golf or curling.

This can be 20 minutes or less.

So, could we shift them to a later phase in order to optimize performance. So, in the case of electronic devices, we still want to preach to put them away but then also potentially supplement with blue light blocking glasses to help mitigate the effect of the blue light exposure.What we see in the research is around 50 percent of athletes are being flagged as having sleep problems. For most of our athletes, we would recommend about a 20-30-minute nap on important training or competition days so they aren’t waking up in the deeper stages of sleep, and more of a longer 90-minute nap on their days off. We want to make sure that the athletes don’t have any underlying sleep problems, so our sleep optimization strategies will help. This is when melatonin is starting to ramp up and this is not good thing for performance. Given competition times are fixed, can we use light to shift the athlete in a direction so they are performing at a peak level internally regardless of the competition time. They’re keen to do whatever they can to get better sleep quality and quantity. Amy Bender, University of Calgary, explains how you can help your athletes gain a better understanding of how beneficial proper sleep can be when it comes to their recovery and performance.